As a disruptive brand and design strategy firm that creates briefs across multiple creative disciplines including Advertising, Design, and Innovation, Tom Bassett, CEO of Bassett & Partners (and founder of MindSwarms), was curious to understand how some of the world’s most consistently exceptional creative talents thought about – and used – the brief.

Through a series of one-on-one interviews with Frank Gehry (Founder Gehry Partner), Yves Béhar (CEO fuseproject), Maira Kalman (Illustrator), John C Jay (President @ GX, Partner @ Wieden + Kennedy), David Rockwell (CEO Rockwell Group), and John Boiler (CEO 72andSunny), we asked them to elaborate on how they define – and use – the brief to deliver exceptional creative results.

The end goal of Briefly is to help inform and inspire future generations of collaborators to write better briefs and manage the briefing process differently in order to help lead to exceptional creative results.

So while every project will still start with a brief, the dream is that more projects end up exceptional because of how these creative titans inspire (or re-inspire) the way we all think about briefs.